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Future Bike 2014

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Future Bike: At the intersection of mobility and identity

September 11, 2014 | 1 to 7 p.m. | Pittsburgh, Pa.

The future success of the bike movement rests on recognizing the strength in our diversity. Hosted by the League's Women Bike Program and Equity Initiative, Future Bike met at the intersections of difference to create a vision for bicycling that elevates new voices, engages local communities and reimagines how we create streets that are vibrant public spaces that bring us together.

At this half-day forum, we gathered nearly 150 attendees from across the country to discuss how to involve and be led by new and previously overlooked stakeholders — and how to integrate those perspectives to redefine and grow the bike movement. Did you attend? Share your feedback here!

2-3:15 p.m. Breakout sessions

Future Leadership (Room 310)

In most communities, the path to leadership follows a traditional outline that favors those currently in power while excluding others who lack certain cultural or professional indicators. What are the traditional roads to leadership within the bicycle movement, and how can new stakeholders in bicycling forge their own way? What can the current leaders of the bicycling community do to encourage and develop leaders within underrepresented communities? And finally, how can the new and newly diverse generation of bike movement leaders use their differences as strengths to build a broader, healthier, more inclusive bike movement?

Speakers:

Megan Odett, Alliance for Biking & Walking, Kidical Mass DC

Ed Ewing, Cascade Bicycle Club

Sam Ollinger, BikeSD

Naomi Doerner, Bike Easy

Future Messaging (Room 315)

How can we shift the form and shape of messaging in the future of the bike movement? What are your challenges and ideas in sharing stories and spreading equitable images of bicycling? In this session, communicators from different backgrounds and mediums will share their work, including Niiobli Armah, Manager, Childhood Obesity, Health & Wellness at NAACP; Monica Garrison, founder of Black Girls Do Bike; Dr. Echo Rivera, data visualization expert; and Rebecca Susman, founder of Bike PIttsburgh's Women and Bicycles program and zine.

Speakers:

Rebecca Susman, Bike Pittsburgh

Echo Rivera, data visualization consultant

Monica Garrison, Black Girls Do Bike

Future Education (Room 311)

What is the future of bike education? How do bike educators convey respect in culturally appropriate ways? As the bike movement expands, what we teach each other about bikes will change. This panel brings together bike safety educators who have experience teaching in cross-cultural settings.

Speakers:

Liz Cornish Jones, League of American Bicyclists

Anthony Taylor, Founding member of Major Taylor Bicycling Club of Minnesota

Maria Sipin, Women on Bikes SoCal and #womentalkbikes co-host

Liz Pisarczyk, Neighborhood Bike Works

Creative Biking Outreach Strategies: A workshop with James Rojas and the Pittsburgh community (Room 305)

Biking is inherently spatial and experiential. For the public, biking is an activity shaped by memories, uses, experiences, and desires. Bike infrastructure is a physical place of reactions, and a mental space of imagination. Through the workshop, participants examine their physical and desired connections with the street to help develop bike projects, plans, and policies. Read more about the workshop here.

3:15-4 p.m. Snack break

Unconference Cafe (Room 315): What equity succeses or challenges are you facing in your community? What questions or issues do you want to discuss? Bring them to our unconference cafe and propel the Future Bike vision.

Wheelwomen Switchboard meetup (Room 305): Organized by Elly BlueThe Wheelwomen Switchboard is an online community where women in bicycling can ask for and offer resources, connections, jobs, and more. Come meet up in person! Switchboard users and people who aren't signed up yet are all welcome. Bring your snacks, your business cards, one thing you need from the world, and one thing you have to offer.

4:15-5:30 p.m. Breakout sessions

Future Planning (Room 311)

What does future bike planning look like? What are the key areas where planners and advocates should focus their attention to make street projects more inviting to more communities? Join bike planning and design experts for a discussion of bike planning education and practice, and what we should include in Equitable Bike Planning 101.

Speakers:

Jessica Roberts, Alta Planning + Design

Jamaal Green, PhD student, Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning, Portland State University

Mike Smart, Professor of Planning and Public Policy, Rutgers University

Zakcq Lockrem, Asakura Robinson

Future Engagement (Room 315)

How do we cultivate new models of community engagement that are driven by the vision of local residents? Panelists who have firsthand experience connecting community members with city planning will discuss how outreach can be a civic engagement tool.

Speakers:

Joanna Bernstein, Casa San Jose

Chema Hernández-Gil, San Francisco Bicycle Coalition

Miguel Ramos, Multicultural Communities for Mobility

Future Technology (Room 310)

What role do physical and digital technology play in expanding access to streets and input into the design process? How can new technologies make bicycling more accessible for more people by revealing and closing gaps in who counts? Bringing together experts in bike movement history, family biking and transportation planning, this panel will explore the role of play and innovation in expanding bicycling.

Biking is inherently spatial and experiential. For the public, biking is an activity shaped by memories, uses, experiences, and desires. Bike infrastructure is a physical place of reactions, and a mental space of imagination. Through the workshop, participants examine their physical and desired connections with the street to help develop bike projects, plans, and policies. Read more about the workshop here.

5:45-7 p.m. Closing session (Room 304)

Featuring James Rojas

7:30-9:30 p.m. Party, networking, filmscreening!

Join us at the BeerHive — 2117 Penn Ave, Pittsburgh, PA 15222 — for a chance to meet fellow Future Bike attendees and continue the conversation.

We'll also be screening, Aftermass, a film by Joe Biel. The world looks to Portland, Oregon as an example of how bicycle culture can blossom out of the ruinous freeways of car-oriented civilization. Aftermass is the first feature documentary to explore the events, people, politics, and social changes that led to Portland becoming the first major bicycle city in the United States. Aftermass features many of the leaders and major participants behind the growth of bicycling ridership since 1971. The narrative demonstrates the complex dynamic throughout the 1990s between advocacy organizations, politicians, city planners, and the then new, grassroots Critical Mass ride. The film is full of smiling faces on two wheels, but also explores the controversies, setbacks, and bumps along the way, including riots, political roadblocks, and an illegal police spy. The film provides new and vital insights into Portland's transportation history as well as into paths other cities can follow to healthy planning and a green future.

Joanna Bernstein is the Service Coordinator at Casa San Jose Pittsburgh, a welcome and resource center for Latino immigrants. She works to connect Latinos with the resources and services that they need and to engage them civically. Joanna holds a Master's Degree in Community and Regional Planning from the University of Oregon. While studying in Oregon, she worked under Dr. Gerardo Sandoval and conducted community based research on how to encourage undocumented immigrants to participate in local government. She worked as a planning consultant to the City of Eugene's Human Rights Office and assisted the City in developing their first LEP (limited English proficiency) plan. She was as an active member of the Lane County Network for Immigrant Integration in Oregon, an interagency task force focused on immigrant-friendly city and county planning. She began riding a bike in Oregon in 2010. After getting comfortable with biking in a small town, Joanna now enjoys biking the streets of Pittsburgh, something that she knows she would not have had the confidence to do had it not been for her three years living in Oregon. She is passionate about issues related to social and racial justice. She is particularly interested in how to foster cultural understanding and cooperation between Black and Latino communities. Joanna is originally from Pittsburgh, PA.

Naomi Doerner is the executive director at Bike Easy, Greater New Orleans' bicycle advocacy organization, and a dedicated transportation planning professional with a passion and talent for engaging communities and growing coalitions, particularly around walking and bicycling for public health, safety and access. Naomi integrates her perspective as a Latina woman as well as being a person who walks and bikes for transportation into engagement processes and programming. Throughout her career, she has developedmeaningful participation and leadership opportunities in planning processes for youth, women, and people of color as a means of creating representative, equitable, and sustainable communities. Prior to her work in New Orleans, Naomi lived and worked in New York City as a planning consultant, where she also co-founded a non-profit urban planning and design education initiative that empowered teens from traditionally underserved neighborhoods called, Velo-City. Naomi holds a Master of Urban Planning from New York University's Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service in New York, NY and a Bachelor of Arts in International Development from Kennesaw State University.

Ed Ewing is a Minnesota native and developed a love for cycling through family bike trips and riding to work with his father. Ed completed his first bike race in 1984 and has an avid bike racer ever since. After graduating from the College of St. Thomas in '88, he moved to Seattle to start a sales & marketing career with Honeywell, Steelcase, and Haworth. In 2007, Ed left the corporate world and joined Cycle University to pursue his passion for coaching, instructing, and sharing the benefits of cycling. While coaching and marketing for Cycle University, Ed discovered the great advocacy work of the Cascade Bicycle Club and accepted the opportunity to create and direct the Major Taylor Project. The Major Taylor Project is a prefect representation of Ed's purpose and passion for cycling: "Everyone, regardless of race, gender, age, ability, or money, should be able to enjoy a bike. The 'bike' has literally transformed my life. Ed is now the Director of Diversity & Inclusion at Cascade Bicycle Club. Cascade Bicycle Club, a non-profit organization based in Seattle, Washington, serves more than 16,000 members and the Puget Sound bicycling community. Our mission is to create a better community through bicycling. Cascade is operated by a 12-member volunteer Board of Directors, 32 professional staff, four AmeriCorps members, and thousands of volunteers.

Zack Furness, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Communications at Penn State University, Greater Allegheny. He is author of One Less Car: Bicycling and the Politics of Automobility (Temple University Press, 2010) and various articles and book chapters on bicycling, media, punk culture, and teaching. He is also editor of Punkademics (Minor Compositions, 2012) and co-editor of The NFL: Critical and Cultural Perspectives (Temple University Press, 2014).Furness was a longtime contributing editor of one of the world’s first online publications, Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life, and his work has appeared in the magazines Souciant, Bitch, and Punk Planet. Active in bands since 1997, he currently sings in Barons.

Monica Garrison is the founder of BlackGirlsDOBike.com, a website with more than 2,800 diverse and engaged followers that is committed to growing and supporting a community of women and girls of color who share a passion for cycling. Black Girls Do Bike also welcomes the bike curious and hopes to enlighten women about the mental and physical benefits of being active and introducing cycling into your life. Monica works to help women of color meet up with other women in their cities to share insight, ask questions, organize rides, and engage in their bicycling communities. More than a dozen U.S. cites now have Black Girls Do Bike Chapters where seasoned riders and newbies meet-up to ride regularly. Black Girls Do Bike shares positive images of ladies and their bikes on the web answering the question, “Do black girls bike?” with a resounding, “Yes!”

Jamaal Green is a PhD student in the Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning at Portland State University. A planner by training, Jamaal's research focuses on the intersections of land-use planning, economic development, and sustainability planning. In particular, he focuses on how planning, and planners, can incorporate socially equitable and just ethics, reasoning, and methodologies within their work in order to bring about effective and just outcomes. Drawing from planning scholars as diverse as Norman Krumholz and Heather Campbell, Jamaal seeks to reinsert social equity as a fundamental principle of planning practice and scholarship.

Chema Hernández Gil is a Community Organizer at the SF Bicycle Coalition and leads the advocacy campaigns for improved infrastructure in the Tenderloin, SoMa and the eastern half of San Francisco. He also manages the SF Bicycle Coalition-side of the Community Bike Build Program, an innovative collaboration between a dozen community groups that is making biking an alternative for everyday transportation for all San Franciscans. His background is in engineering with a heavy dose of community and media activism.

Jennifer Sta. Ines is a spatial analyst who works on transportation issues in New York City. Her background in and appreciation of maps, data, and commuting by bike brought her to MindRider. Along with helmet creator, Arlene Ducao, and team members, Jennifer is currently MindRiding Manhattan to fulfill the studio’s successful Kickstarter campaign, MindRider Maps NYC: A mental picture of bike riding. Jennifer has a strong interest in grassroots mapping and spends most of her free time collaborating on projects that engage and interact with the urban environment with the group, Urban Solutions.

Zakcq Lockrem is a principal and the director of planning for Asakura Robinson, an urban planning, design and landscape architecture firm based in Austin, Houston and Tokyo. Growing up in South Minneapolis, Zakcq Lockrem became fascinated with the unique overlap of infrastructure and culture that makes up a city. In his work, he focuses on the experience of urban space and the role of public space in shaping civic engagement. He brings broad project experience from the gulf coast, Asia, New England, California, Mexico and West Africa working on issues from cycling to affordable housing. In addition, Zakcq brings significant experience from the non-profit sector, which he utilizes in developing cutting-edge public participation strategies and to build the capacity of communities. He served as an adjunct professor of urban planning at Texas Southern University, and is a co-founder of Social Agency Lab, a collaborative of urban planners and designers and anthropologists who engage in public art and creative urban interventions.

Shane MacRhodes has worked for over two decades in the active transportation field. His work with non-profits, worker-owned cooperative businesses, and government agencies has been focused on cargo bikes, multi-modal transportation, and making advocacy fun and accessible. He co-founded Kidical Mass, the family focused bike ride that has swept across the country, and runs a Safe Routes to School program at School District 4j in Eugene, Oregon. Shane is a certified League Cycling Instructor Coach with the League of American Bicyclists and has taught hundreds of students (and instructors) from ages 8-78. He created a bicycle and pedestrian education program that is integrated into the three local school districts and helped integrate the SRTS program into the school transportation departments. He works closely with the City of Eugene to build better infrastructure, policies and programs that make car-lite living easier. Now a father to three (5 year old Isadora and 4 year old twins Gus and Ben) his passion for creating better cities for people to live, work and play has grown even more. He sees his job as fomenting a revolution through creating fun, collaborative, and accessible projects and places. You can follow him on twitter @EugeneSRTS, instagram @shanerh or send him an email at rhodes_sh@4j.lane.edu

Megan Odett is the founder of the Washington, DC chapter of Kidical Mass, the national movement to encourage parents and children to bicycle together. In spring 2012, Megan partnered with the local Department of Transportation and the Washington Area Bicyclist Association to create the first annual ABC’s of Family Biking. Now an annual event, the ABC’s of Family Biking educated local parents about the tools and equipment that enable them to bicycle with children their children; it has served as a model for similar programs in the U.S. and abroad. Megan has spoken about women’s and family bicycling at the National Women’s Bicycling Forum, on national webinars, and in numerous advisory conversations with bicycling advocates around the country. Megan’s favorite biking activity is riding to splash parks with her two sons. She occasionally indulges in cargo stunts with her e-assist cargo bike that involve carrying any combination of: her children, her dog, her cat, a jogging stroller, a week’s worth of groceries, and a carpet steamer.

Samantha Ollinger is the founder of BikeSD, Inc, a non-profit cycling advocacy organization whose mission is to transform San Diego's streetscape to be a world-class bicycle friendly city. As the Executive Director, Ollinger sees San Diego exemplifying the ideal urban city that civic leaders around the world can only aspire to. Bicycling is one of the many avenues to lead San Diego onto the world-stage and BikeSD is committed to changing and executing the city's narrative that will drive this transformation. While previously completely uninspired by bike advocacy, Ollinger was drawn to this burgeoning movement during her 2008 cross country trip that ended in Texas. On a bike path in West Virginia, witnessing a small monument dedicated to a woman (Sue Ann Miller) who had worked tirelessly to bring this facility to life, Ollinger was inspired enough to dedicate her time (now going on three years) to the cause. An immigrant to the U.S. from India and a graduate of Temple University with a Business Administration degree with a focus on Accounting, Ollinger evaluates the movement around livability through a financial lens.

Liz Pisarczyk is Program Director at Neighborhood Bike Works (NBW) in Philadelphia, an organization that offers educational, recreational, and career-building opportunities to urban youth through bicycle education. She first became involved in the summer of 2008 as an intern while completing her Masters in Social Work from the University of Pennsylvania. In spring 2011, she returned to NBW and has since helped run programs to engage neighborhood youth. She has been an Instructor for the popular Earn-A-Bike class and Summer Camp where youth learn to safely navigate the city while also gaining hands-on experience to fix a bicycle. In addition, she has managed the NBW's Work Ready program which provides youth paid positions to serve as Youth Instructors and Shop Apprentices. As Program Director, Liz has developed two new programs: Ride Club to engage beginner level students to learn more about ride safety and on the road repairs while exploring great local landmarks in West Philadelphia and the Leadership & Advanced Mechanics Course for older youth to deepen their bike mechanics' skills and develop leadership and teaching skills that they then use as hired Youth Instructors in our programs. She has a strong background in positive youth development having spent most of her career working with youth from all backgrounds in a variety of settings including a therapeutic wilderness program, a girls adventure-based summer program, and a group home for adolescents. Liz serves as a founding member of Youth Bike and serves on the Youth Bike Steering Committee.

Miguel Ramosis the Bike Safety Outreach Coordinator for Multicultural Communities for Mobility (MCM). His role with MCM has been to coordinate bilingual and Spanish bicycle safety workshops to diverse community groups throughout Los Angeles County. Ramos also serves on the City of Los Angeles' Bicycle Advisory Committee, where he continues to advocate and share perspectives on how underserved communities can obtain sustainable equity within the bike movement. Furthermore, Miguel is a member of Raíces Roots, a people of color collective that embarked on a bike and bus migration to Latin America with the intention to learn and share the cultural, ancestral and social wisdom that derive from these countries, especially when it comes to the bicycle movement and sustainability. Most recently, Miguel has finished coordinating the 2014 LA Rooted summer program, a program that allows Youth of Color to bicycle and use other forms of transportation as a way to connect to the diverse and cultural communities throughout Los Angeles. As a Los Angeles native Miguel is inspired daily by the resilience and ambition of the cultural communities that define Los Angeles.He recognizes that the bicycle is often used by Communities of Color and sees this as a vital tool to educate and empower people in obtaining social and environmental justice in all communities. Currently, Miguel is part of the leadership creating transformative change in Los Angeles’ urban environment that promotes cultural neighborhoods across the region to take ownership of these safe, healthy, clean and bicycle-oriented linkages.

Echo Rivera is a research consultant and data analyst in Chicago, specializing in creating visual materials for social research and evaluation projects, including data visualizations and GIS maps. She believes that community-based research/evaluation can be used to promote social equity, and started cycling as a way to cope with challenges that come with doing this work. She writes and creates graphics (including comics!) about cycling and social justice. Connect with Echo on twitter https://twitter.com/echointhecity, or check out her bike blog: http://echointhecity.wordpress.com

Jessica Roberts is a principal at Alta Planning + Design, handling all the firm's active transportation education and encouragement projects. She has been active in the bicycle advocacy and bike/ped professional world since 2001, and is currently managing projects in 8 states. Her work ranges from organizing a bike fest for 250 families in Santa Monica, to partnering with Mexican arts organizations on bicycle events in Chicago, to training Seattle second-graders to cross the street safely. She loves her family's carfree lifestyle, and loves to help anyone, but especially other families, walk and bicycle more often. Follow her on Twitter at @jessicaroberts.

Maria Sipin is a Southern California native who advocates for the wellbeing of youth and LGBTQ persons who are affected by homelessness and chronic illness. She is a health communications specialist at the Division of Adolescent and Young Adult Medicine at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. Her professional experience is grounded in nonprofit community health and clinical research for HIV prevention and care, where transit plays a key role in linking people to essential services. Maria is keen on social media and the role of technology for achieving health objectives and enjoys working on projects with a public health and social equity focus that facilitate wellness, creativity, and structural changes. An advisory board member for Multicultural Communities for Mobility, she promotes the joys and benefits of bicycles through Women on Bikes California, as volunteer for the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition, and as a League Cycling Instructor who champions the importance of increasing the skills and confidence levels for bicyclists of all ages.

Dr. Michael Smart is an assistant professor at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers. His research interests include the influence of social and spatial phenomena on individuals’ transportation decisions, with a particular interest in built-environment effects on alternative modes of travel, such as biking and walking. His prior research has examined the travel decisions of immigrants to the United States, in particular their use of bicycles, carpools, and public transportation. Dr. Smart’s current research explores the ways in which social networks embedded in particular neighborhoods of affinity—such as immigrant neighborhoods and gay and lesbian neighborhoods—influence the activity patterns of those who live in those neighborhoods. His work has examined the extent to which immigrant neighborhoods across the country function as “cities-within-cities,” and developed novel techniques for describing the inward- or outward-focus of neighborhoods. He received his PhD from the Department of Urban Planning at UCLA in 2011, as well as a Master’s degree in planning from the University of Pennsylvania in 2006 and a Bachelor’s degree in German from Yale in 2000.

Rebecca Susman is the Membership and Outreach Manager at Bike Pittsburgh. With a background in social justice advocacy, she believes strongly in building an inclusive bicycling community, and creates outreach programs with the goal of increasing the visibility of all who ride (both literally and figuratively). In response to hit-and-runs that occurred during the spring and summer of 2012, Becca helped develop and launch the Drive With Care Campaign. To convey the humanity of people who bike, the campaign profiles real Pittsburghers who ride bikes on bus shelters and billboards throughout the city. She also started BikePGH's Women and Biking Program to provide a space for women to learn from one another, share experiences, and begin addressing barriers to their feelings of safety and autonomy while riding. The program brings together diverse groups of women for events, creating a new, collaborative Women and Biking zine to share the participants' perspectives with a larger community. Holding a Master of Social Work with concentrations in Community Organizing and Social Administration, Becca works to promote an awareness of equity issues as a means for creating social change.

Anthony Taylor is a founding member of the Major Taylor Bicycling Club of Minnesota, a nonprofit social/recreational club that promotes safe and fun cycling geared toward the African-American communities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. He is also the Vice President of the National Brotherhood of Cyclists, a group of grassroots African American cycling clubs from around the country.

In 2012, the League hosted the first National Women's Bicycling Summit at the Pro Walk Pro Bike Pro Place conference in Long Beach, Calif. That event not only launched our Women Bike program — but created a space that welcomed a wide diversity of female bicyclists. In that room, we saw the future of the bike movement — and knew we needed to do more to address who is and who is not represented in informing and benefitting from our work. Our Equity Initiative has challenged our organization to look inward at our own practices and programs, and convene conversations with grassroots leaders to advance the bike equity discussion at large. Grounded in the same principles of leadership and inclusion, Women Bike and the Equity Initiative are combining forces for another ground-breaking event. Read more about the background.

Bicycling's benefits seem so obvious to those of us who experience them, but, as highlighted in our "Together in America's Streets" report and exhibit, we never finished the project of building a cultural consensus around bicycling. As long as we ignore this need, we will face opposition to expanding bicycling opportunities for more Americans. As long as we ignore this need, our own expressions of identity and community on bicycles will continue to be scapegoated for larger problems such as inequality and gentrification. We need to come together and form a powerful consensus around what bicycling means for our future. Read more about the importance.

Keynote presenter: James Rojas

James RojasJames Rojas holds an MA in City Planning and an MS in Architecture Studies from MIT. He works as a city and transportation planner, and is the founder of the Latino Urban Forum, a non-profit dedicated to increasing awareness of planning and design issues facing low-income Latinos. He has written and lectured extensively about how culture and immigration are transforming the American front yard and landscape, and, through Place It!, has organized an impressive number of on-site model installations and interactive workshops.

Combining visual arts with my urban planning knowledge and skills, I aspire to create responsive cities through an inclusive, socially conscious art practice that taps into the basic human need to create. Through facilitated workshops, I provide a level playing field and safe space for public dialogue and creative collaborations. I give participants the tools and knowledge to take control of the world around them by reflecting upon, exploring, participating in and crafting urban communities. - James Rojas